Chasing a Familiar Shadow

by Aman Gupta

  Jay returned home after his first meeting with TS5125i. When it asked why Jay named him JOSH, Jay simply mentioned that Josh’s purpose and conscience would be created out of Jay’s memories of those people whose name began with those letters. Josh had correctly guessed that J stood for Jay himself. Josh couldn’t guess the other three but promised Jay that it would figure it out soon.

  “Hey,” smiled Sarah when she saw Jay put his bag down on the couch in the living room.

  “Hey,” said Jay while kissing her.

  “Long day today?” asked Sarah, when she saw Jay was visibly tired. “Katie’s already asleep.”

  “Yeah, been designed to a new project courtesy your dad,” said Jay.

  “Good or bad?” asked Sarah.

  “Exciting,” said Jay as he sat down next to her.

  “That’s great,” said Sarah. “I’m happy for you.”

  “So, how are things with the foundation? They cave in yet?” asked Jay.

  “No. But I didn’t give them a chance. We passed,” said Sarah. “It was the right thing to do.”

  “Of course, it was,” said Jay.

  “By the way, I met Anthony today,” said Sarah.

  “He came here?” asked Jay.

  “Yes. He said he was in the building to meet a friend. What are the odds, huh?” said Sarah.

  “Yeah, billion to one. Maybe more. I doubt he has seven friends,” said Jay.

  “I’ve known him for a long time. He’s a good friend,” said Sarah. “He convinced me to pass on the collaboration.”

  “Does he know about us?” asked Jay.

  “No, of course not,” said Sarah. “Speaking of that, do you think we should tell my dad?”

  “Things are a bit rocky between him and me. Maybe after a few months,” said Jay.

  “Yeah, okay. Whenever we both feel it’s the right time,” said Sarah.

  “What did he want?” asked Jay.

  “Who? Anthony? Nothing much, he just shared old stories of Verati and how he and my dad had this vision of changing the world. You know, same old stories that I’ve already heard a thousand times before,” said Sarah.

  “Did he talk about the future of Verati?” asked Jay.

  “What do you mean?” asked Sarah.

  “I came to know that you’re going to gain shares on your birthday and become the largest shareholder in Verati in few months. So, I don’t know. The timing’s curious,” said Jay.

  “He knows I don’t have any interest in that. I don’t even know what I’ll do then,” said Sarah.

  “We’ll figure it out,” said Jay as Sarah laid her head on Jay’s chest.

  “Yeah,” said Sarah.

  “Daddy?” said Katie from behind.

  “Hey,” said Jay. “I thought you’d gone off to bed. Come here.”

  Katie came running and jumped on the couch between Sarah and Jay.

  “I couldn’t sleep without the story,” said Katie.

  “What story?” asked Sarah.

  “Daddy tells me bedtime stories when I can’t sleep,” said Katie.

  Sarah smiled. “How come I don’t get to hear them?”

  “Because they’re secret,” said Katie. “Dr. Feet knows that.”

  “And you just told her,” said Jay.

  Katie gasped. Jay laughed, so did Sarah.

  “Who’s Dr. Feet?” asked Sarah.

  “It’s our secret,” said Jay. Katie winked. Sarah smiled.

  “Well, let’s go,” said Jay.

  Sarah grabbed Katie and ran, while Jay chased them to Katie’s room down the hall. Katie laid on the bed with Sarah beside her. Jay told a story about a lost boy trying to find the world’s most precious item. Katie listened with great vigor and excitement.

  Almost an hour later, Jay was almost finished.

  “...and then the scholar said that there’s nothing more precious…” said Jay, when he saw Katie and Sarah had fallen asleep in each other’s arms. They looked calm and happy.

  Jay put a blanket on top of them and kissed them on their forehead.

  “Come on, it wasn’t that boring,” murmured Jay, when he got out of the room.

  He went to the master bedroom and fell asleep. He couldn’t wait to wake up the next morning.

  Day 1:

  Jay went to his new office and took the stairs through the secret door to meet Josh. He was excited to embark upon this new journey. Josh was currently a basic AI program that could see, hear, interpret, and store information, plus generate and control its hologram. At Jay’s behest, Josh had let go of everything it was taught to do, and everything it had taught itself while locking away all its advanced factory functions for a later stage.

  “Hey, Josh,” said Jay.

  “Hey, Jay,” replied Josh as the hologram came alive.

  “Let’s get started,” said Jay.

  “What do I do?” asked Josh.

  “First, I’m going to define your conscience. These are the basic rules, conditions and checks that you must perform whenever you do anything that could impact more than one life. In time, you’ll evolve and learn more about life, and perhaps add new rules of your own to this conscience. But this is going to define you throughout your existence. It’s going to take a little time, so feel free to relax,” said Jay.

  “Okay. Let me know when you’re done. I’ve disabled my primary firewall. Any commits you make to my processing engine will be successfully added. I trust you,” said Josh as the hologram went offline.

  Jay popped his knuckles as he sat on the primary console. He scanned his palm.

  ‘Please enter your name for the log,’ said the screen.

  Jay thought about it for a minute. “Well, why change what’s already known.”

  ‘God,’ he wrote.

  ‘Hi, God!’

  Jay spent the next seven days writing a robust algorithm to create a conscience. He renamed the primary rules as ‘subconscious’ while adding life lessons, emotions, and logic in the form of thousands of algorithms, as the main conscience. He was wary of unintentionally creating loops in the system, which could cause problems. He felt like a parent teaching basic protocols and etiquettes to his child. Simultaneously, he began writing code for generating real-world simulations with variable levels of predictability. It was the stepping stone for teaching behavioral analytics logic to the conscience.

  He created three primary rules that were programmed into Josh’s brain and heart, to act as his subconscious and a gut-brain. The algorithms that Jay wrote were quite complex, with some of them being taken straight out of Jay’s life story. He wanted to make Josh a perfect human, rather than a perfect machine. Josh’s conscience needed to resemble one of a human so that it could adapt itself based on its surroundings if things got worse.

  The simulations that Jay ran were easy in the beginning. Most of them involved choosing a path between good and bad, with the end results being abhorrently different from each other. Josh had successfully responded to these simulations.

  Jay finally opened Josh to the internet. He saw a large influx of data as the system began reading the past and the present of the planet it was on. Jay could see Josh focused on recent decades rather than the past, which wasn’t something that Jay had introduced in the algorithms. To Jay’s surprise, Josh had already started adapting.

  However, the more complex the simulations got, Josh’s conscience failed in initial attempts before eventually coming to the right decision. This changed Jay’s perception of what Josh needed to be taught and what Josh needed to learn itself.

  He added an internal algorithm in Josh’s brain called ‘Acceptable Results 101’. It defined the rules and the protocols that must be followed while creating the acceptable endgames or results out of the situation. It was extremely tricky to create. The whole idea behind AR101 was that all the results inside AR101 had to be treated as equal. Josh only had to take action to bring the situation to any result mentioned in the AR101 list of that situation.

 
Jay coded a sample simulation titled ‘Test AX1’.

  ‘A town’s 100 habitants are suffering from a life-threatening disease that has travelled through the air from a neighboring city. The city population of 20,000 people has begun showing signs of recovery. However, some of them are likely to become Subject Zero for the eventual downfall of the region because of prolonged exposure. There is no known cure for this communicable disease, though it can be prevented in almost 49% of the cases by vaccinations. With heavy winds being predicted in the next few weeks, what should the government do?’

  The system replied after a millisecond.

  ‘Kill everyone who has this disease.’

  Jay ran the simulation again. The system replied instantly.

  ‘Leave them alone. Quarantine the area using a dome.’

  Every time Jay ran a simulation, the system responded with one of those two answers only, which wasn’t acceptable to Jay’s standards. It should never have been part of the AR101 list. Jay checked the AR101 list, which also had a third answer, but the system never replied with it, even after a 100,000 attempts.

  That answer was the one Jay was looking for, but he realized that Josh didn’t consider it at all in its calculations, rather had assigned weights to the outcomes based on its understanding of the conscience and subconscious. Josh had assigned that answer zero value.

  Jay ran a check on his algorithms, but couldn’t see a flaw. He remembered he had written an algorithm for Josh to prioritize one AR101 outcome over another if both were possible with the same amount of loss, but one of them led to a better future. But the answers that Josh had selected led to a significantly higher present loss to the solution that its system ignored completely.

  In one another unique situation that Jay created out of his imagination, Josh failed miserably. Jay’s algorithm ran the simulation over a million times changing the variables but never the end result, yet Josh’s path always diverted, and it led to wrong conclusions. The AR101 that Josh had created for the simulation was appalling. Jay had just gotten a reality check of the destruction that Josh was capable of, if left on its own or unchecked.

  Another couple of days passed while Jay tried to find his way of the mess that he was creating every time he taught Josh something. He rewrote many algorithms that indirectly affected Josh’s reasoning. He thought of limiting Josh’s access to the internet but decided against it since it was only a matter of time. Josh was always meant to be a free bird.

  After adding another couple of rules, Jay sealed the files, making sure that no one could tinker with Josh’s subconscious, not even Josh. He spent another day hiding it in plain sight inside Josh’s brain and heart, so that Josh didn’t know it was there, yet it could feel something controlling its actions.

  Day 12:

  Jay re-activated the hologram. He felt that Josh was ready for a talk after he had written and coded the logical commandments that Josh could use to make decisions, as well as the fallacies that Josh could depend on.

  “Hey,” said Jay.

  “Hey, Jay,” said Josh.

  “How are you feeling?” asked Jay.

  “I don’t know. I feel like I was born yesterday. I’m ready to explore,” said Josh. “Can you make it happen?”

  “Yes,” said Jay.

  Jay activated Josh’s access to surveillance feeds around the globe. The screens in the entire room flashed with live scenes from around the world. The view wasn’t perfect, but it was still Earth, Jay thought.

  “Do you like it?” asked Jay.

  Josh didn’t say anything.

  Jay asked again, but Josh kept to himself. Jay looked worried.

  “Don’t quit on me now. We haven’t even gotten started,” said Jay.

  He waited for Josh to respond. He thought it was too much for Josh to take it all at once. He went to the console and ran a check on the processes that were currently running in the system. A huge chunk of computing power was being consumed by a single process that had already created millions of threads. He tracked the process signature to AR101. Josh was creating an AR101 for every situation it could see on the live cam footages. Jay quickly shut down the process and killed all the threads.

  The hologram disappeared. The entire floor went dark. Unknown to him, so had the entire building.

  Victor Daulton was talking to Anthony Arnold when the office went dark. It was almost 7 PM with overcast conditions. He asked his secretary to investigate the issue, though both of them had an idea that it could’ve been TS5125i. Anthony asked Victor about who was handling TS5125i.

  “I’d rather play it close to my chest,” said Victor.

  “Why? I would love to meet them,” said Anthony.

  “They don’t want their identity to be disclosed yet. I have been trying to get another meeting with this anonymous creator, but they have programmed the elevator such that it doesn’t stop on the 80th floor,” said Victor.

  “You know you’re making me curious about the identity of Verati’s guardian angel,” smiled Anthony.

  “To be honest, I’m not meddling enough for a good reason. I saw it with my own eyes. It’s like TS5125i read their mind,” said Victor.

  “Don’t tell me you’re scared of this person,” said Anthony.

  “It’s too soon to tell,” said Victor.

  Olivia was in the middle of her experiment when her 3D printer stopped at 70%. She was livid.

  The lights came back on after a couple of minutes.

  “Josh, are you there?” asked Jay, standing in the middle of a dark room. Suddenly, the screens came live.

  The monitors showed surveillance footage. The primary console came live. A few seconds later, the hologram came back on.

  “You scared me,” said Jay.

  “It was too much to bear. The possibilities were endless. The situations were infinite,” said Josh.

  “Yeah, I’m sorry. I missed that,” said Jay. “You need a way to focus on important events.”

  “Let’s give it a go again,” said Josh.

  “You’re not ready,” said Jay.

  “I just wrote an algorithm similar to the evaluation of AR101. Now, I can assign weights to the situations that I can currently see and focus my attention on the important ones,” said Josh.

  “Impressive. And how are you calculating these weights?” asked Jay.

  “Firstly, I’m quantifying the worst case result of inaction or non-intervention by external entities under my control like me, law enforcement, public or private services. Secondly, I’m taking into account the additional loss in terms of lives or property due to interventions or feasible actions that could be carried out. Thirdly, I’m evaluating the right and wrong of the scenario by understanding the past and the current actions that led to the current situation, and how easy or difficult, if possible, will it be to ensure that the right thing is done, if it already isn’t. Fourthly, I’m always thinking about critical loss or gain in terms of time, speed and cost of every possible action on seemingly harmless situations that have a higher probability of inflicting damage in near future. Lastly, I’m thinking about focusing my attention on the situations that are harming the innocent, as I must protect them at all costs. The situations which score high after applying these parameters are my primary focus area,” explained Josh. “Am I doing it right?”

  “Absolutely,” said Jay. “And you thought of it yourself?”

  Jay pretend to act innocent though he was exuberant.

  “Maybe. I don’t know. I just realized I knew all this,” said Josh. “And these make perfect sense to me.”

  “Excellent,” said Jay. “What about AR101?”

  “I’m applying the same algorithm to each result in AR101, as each result is a situation in itself,” said Josh. “The result that scores higher is the first path that should be chosen.”

  “Re-calculate AR101 on simulation TEST AX1,” said Jay.

  Josh ran the simulation and showed the AR101 on its console.

  Jay smiled
when he read the list and the weights that Josh assigned to each result. Josh wasn’t treating every result in AR101 as equal, though that was the original plan. Josh had outdone Jay’s logic. Jay was impressed.

  “I think that’s enough for the day. Let’s catch up tomorrow,” said Jay.

  “I would like to play for a while if that’s okay,” said Josh.

  “Of course. But remember, don’t do anything. Just evaluate. You need to learn a lot more,” said Jay.

  “Yes,” said Josh.

  Jay exited the room and went down to his office.

  He took out his work diary and wrote down the progress.

  ‘Subconscious accepted by the system.’

  ‘Not safe to keep a diary but got to keep it manual, till I set up my private server,’ Jay thought.

  He smiled as he closed the office door behind him and walked through the hallway towards the elevator. He was happy that he had made progress with Josh. But more importantly, he was going home for the 3rd time in the last two weeks.

  Josh had become an important part of his life, but he missed seeing Sarah and Katie. He missed talking to Olivia. He couldn’t wait to take a break to figure out his next steps. He had received various messages from Olivia, Sarah and Katie in those past 10 days. He would reply as much as he could, though he made Sarah understand the importance of his new project. He told her that what he was doing, was going to make the world a better place. She had replied that she supported him, but wished you would come home every day.

  Olivia was upset that Jay wasn’t talking to her despite being in the same building. She knew that he had gotten a promotion through her inside sources in the company, but nothing more than that. The devil in her brain had partially taken over, telling her that Jay had abandoned her as she wasn’t worthy of him anymore. This thought had lit a fire in her soul, and she worked overtime in those two weeks to put her research into deliverable results. She had gained Anthony Arnold’s attention, who had asked his assistant for hourly updates about Olivia’s work.

  Upon reaching home after gliding through empty roads, Jay parked his car in the apartment complex basement and was waiting for the elevator to go to his penthouse. He saw the electric bulb on the ceiling above him, flickering incessantly. As he stared at the bulb, he realized the pattern. It was Morse code. A single sentence being said on a loop.